Reforging Life and Community: Resilience and Afro-Descendant Memory in the Mines of El Cobre, Cuba

This article examines the sociocultural resilience of the Afro-descendant community in the mining enclave of El Cobre, Cuba, from the mid-seventeenth century through the transformations of the nineteenth century. Far from being merely a site of exhaustion, El Cobre functioned as a historical laboratory of material and symbolic reconfiguration, where the descendants of enslaved workers rebuilt their social, ecological, and spiritual worlds upon the remains of the imperial extractive project. The study proposes resilience as a historical practice of collective reorganization and continuity in the face of colonial dislocation. Rather than a return to a lost equilibrium, Afro-descendant resilience in El Cobre appears as a collective capacity to remake life amid the ruins of extractivism, transforming crisis into contingency. Methodologically, the analysis combines administrative and ecclesiastical sources including official correspondence, censuses, inventories, and parish records with critical perspectives on historical resilience, environmental change, and material memory.